The New Rules Of Wine

You chill your whites but not your reds, pair your fancy bottles with fancy food, and skip right past the pink champagne. Guess what: You're doing wine all wrong. We talked to the best sommeliers, vintners, and career winos around to rewrite the book on this fermented-grape-juice thing.

01 | Don't worry...

If you didn't pick up those subtle hints of “kaffir lime,” “black currant confiture,” and “the sweet stemminess of burning vine clippings”* when you stuck your nose into the glass. Take a look at two different tasting notes for the same bottle of wine—same vineyard, same vintage, two different critics. They almost never taste or smell the same stuff. Which is to say—your guess is as good as theirs. So drink. Decide what you like. And if you detect a hint of quince paste in your Sauvignon Blanc, keep it to yourself. — Stan Parish

*Real Wine Spectator tasting notes!

02 | Yes, we've heard all about terroir. And some of us are a little sick of it.

Sean Thackrey, one of the best winemakers in America (seriously, try his wine), explains why you should get your head out of the soil

“The theory of terroir is the agricultural version of the theory of aristocracy: You are as you were born. You are the Duke of Norfolk or you are not the Duke of Norfolk, and that's that. You buy Château Margaux because it's Château Margaux, and it's Château Margaux because the grapes were grown on a particular piece of land. So much money is riding on this idea that it's imperative, from a financial point of view, to maintain this extremely profitable mystification of real estate. There's no traditional word for ‘winemaker’ in French, Spanish, or Italian, because over there they'd like you to think that we humans are just humble servants of the soil's desire to express itself. Of course grapes grown in different places taste different; that's a banality no one disputes. But so much has to happen to those grapes before they end up in your glass, and someone—the winemaker—has to call those shots. Even if you supplied ten different restaurants with identical produce, you would expect ten totally different results. Do you really think the work of a winemaker is less complex than the work of a chef? Winemaking is like cooking: The chef bats last, for better or worse. And if we're to take the blame for bad results that we deserve, we should get credit for good ones, too.”

03 | Learn to use the World Wine Web.

wine-searcher.com
Looking for that killer Menetou-Salon you drank at someone's party? Wine Searcher will tell you exactly where to find it—and where to find it cheap.

garagiste.com
Kick around the site, then sign up for the poetic daily e-mail offers full of kick-ass wines you've never heard of.

jjbuckley.com
Massive inventory, regular sales, and a “Top Wines Under $25” section from which we've caught many a buzz.

04 | Break out of your wine rotation.

Most oenophiles are like basketball coaches who stick to supertight rotations and leave legitimate talent to languish on the bench. Your Pinots and your Cabernets get tons of playing time, but Riesling? Rarely takes off its warm-ups. This is a waste of great wine—and no way to live your life. So shake things up. — David Lynch

Your Usual — Chardonnay

Your Preference — Creaminess, depth

Your Better Bet — Pinot Bianco from northeastern Italy, a happy medium between the mineral Chardonnays of Burgundy and the fruity full-blown wines of California.

One to Try — Cantina Terlano Alto Adige Pinot Bianco “Vorberg,” $21

Your Usual — Sauvignon Blanc

Your Preference — Assertive aromatics, brisk acidity

Your Better Bet — Riesling, the most underappreciated white wine in the world. Austrian versions are reliably dry, whereas German versions should say trocken (dry) on the label, unless you have a sweet tooth.

One to Try — Weingut Bründlmayer Riesling “Kamptaler Terrassen,” $20

Your Usual — Pinot Grigio

Your Preference — Crispness, poundability

Your Better Bet — If you want a lighter inexpensive white with character, give France's Muscadet a try. Zippy and mineral, with a sea-brine salinity that betrays its coastal origins, Muscadet is resolutely unfashionable and way underpriced.

Your Usual — Pinot Noir

Your Preference — Woodsy aromatics, finesse

Your Better Bet — A simple Sangiovese from Chianti Classico often blows away a Burgundy or American Pinot that costs twice as much. If you're looking for finesse, avoid Chiantis with riserva on the label.

One to Try — Querciabella Chianti Classico, $26

Your Usual — Cabernet Sauvignon

Your Preference — Power, longevity

Your Better Bet — The reds from Portugal's Douro Valley—deep, dry, soulful wines that can wrangle with the fat in any steak. They're made with the same grapes used in the fortified ports that no one drinks anymore.

One to Try — Niepoort “Redoma Tinto” Douro, $48

05 | $200 bottle + $8 burrito = the new wine math.

A few years ago, I was invited to one of the more surreal lunches of my life. It was in the private back room at a nondescript dim sum joint on a grim suburban avenue outside L.A. Around the table was a James Bond gallery of characters: a famous jazz guitarist, two or three chefs, a major wine dealer, a statuesque Hawaiian watchmaker who claimed to be Jackie Chan's best friend. Then there was our host, a Chinese-Indonesian named Rudy, who sat at the head of the table wearing a pair of dark wraparound sunglasses. If you had told me we were there to dine on a lunch of endangered species or to sample human flesh, I'd have believed you.

Instead, I was in for a different kind of gustatory revelation. Rudy was one of the country's biggest wine collectors, and he'd brought some spectacular bottles, among them weathered magnums of 1990 and 1973 Dom Pérignon and a 1961 Comte de Vogüé Musigny, which goes for about $8,700 a bottle. On the menu: dim sum dumplings. Pork buns. Steamed crab. Spare, common Chinatown fare—the last thing you'd expect to eat with world-class French wine. And yet as the champagne bubbled into my glass, it felt like a perfect pairing. After gnawing on a pork dumpling, I could taste how the Comte de Vogüé Musigny changed, growing thicker and more complicated as it soaked up oxygen for the first time since JFK was president. And there was something viscerally decadent about reaching for a champagne flute with greasy fingers.

Ever since, I've gone out of my way to drink great wine with great low-end food. All the textures and flavors against which wine plays so beautifully—spice, crunch, char, salt—are precisely what make “comfort foods” so comfortable. And simple cooking allows you to concentrate on what you're drinking, instead of trying to discern the influence of fennel pollen on that poached-salmon canapé. Quaffing a fine Bordeaux with a burger is also a good reminder that the god of wine is Bacchus, not Apollo, and that drinking should be a lusty ritual, not a hushed, subdued one. It feels good and right and celebratory to walk into a burger joint with a $100 bottle and your own glasses, provided you don't get your ass kicked in the parking lot. — Brett Martin

“Picking out wine is like doing your taxes: Sure, you could do a decent job yourself, but you'll get a bigger return if you ask a pro.” — Adam Rothstein, beverage director, Bobo, N.Y.C.

06 | We'd love to say you can drink wine out of anything. We Can't. Because glasses matter.

“Good wine needs space to roam. Drink your Châteauneuf-du-Pape out of a Mason jar and the wine won't aerate and won't express its fullest character. You don't need varietal-specific stemware—just a universal glass for red and another one for white.” — Helen Johannesen, beverage director, Animal and Son of a Gun restaurants, Los Angeles

07 | Pink champagne ain't just for bridal showers.

“It pairs with fish, with meat, with dessert. And when you open a bottle of rosé champagne, people understand that you are spoiling them.” — Eric Ripert, chef, Le Bernardin, N.Y.C.

08 | But don't blow your wad on bubbles.

Castellroig Brut Rosat Cava, $15 — Like rosé champagne, this goes with damn near anything. And at this price, you can afford to drink all day.

Parigot & Richard Crémant de Bourgogne Blanc NV, $22 — A bargain white from Burgundy? That's right, and the sparklers get you champagne grapes and serious pedigree at a steep discount.

09 | Hey, sommeliers, it's not 1953.

Stop giving the wine list to the oldest, whitest, richest-looking dude at every table.

10 | And enough already with the phone-book-sized wine list.

Oh, you have every Gaja vintage since 1961 on your reserve list? Who cares? It's the oenophile's equivalent of name-dropping, because me and those Barolos are not going to meet in person, at least not at your 300 percent markup. A menu tells you something about the chef, and the same should be true of a wine list and the sommelier. So make some choices. We'd rather see a focused, self-assured one-pager than a tome that takes all night to read. Throw in a bottle of indie champagne, if you must, and one trophy Barolo for the guy who got his bonus. But don't give us eleven pages of wines that most of Monaco can't afford to drink with dinner. We don't use the Yellow Pages, either. — S.P.

11 | Meet us at the wine bar. Seriously.

There was a time when American wine bars were the last place on earth you wanted to hang out and drink. You know the template: a soulless, antiseptic interior with smooth jazz on the stereo and stools so high they gave you vertigo. And then someone remembered that wine needs food—and not just olives on toothpicks. We're talking fried sage leaves stuffed with lamb sausage (Terroir in N.Y.C.), duck confit and flawless fries (Cork Wine Bar in D.C.), and the heaping boards of charcuterie at Venice Beach Wines in Los Angeles, where you can sit outside and smell the ocean while you sip rosé. — S.P.

12 | Forget the label—it's the back of the bottle that'll tell you if it's any good.

Buying wine can feel like Russian roulette, but you can stack the odds in your favor by knowing your importers and distributors—the guys who pick the foreign wines that end up at your liquor store. It's usually the distributor's name on the back of the bottle, but a few big-dog importers also leave their mark. We asked Joe Campanale, co-owner and beverage director at Dell'anima and L'Artusi in Manhattan, whom to trust.

Importers

Kermit Lynch
“The godfather of importers and patron saint of elegant French and Italian wines.”

Louis/Dressner Selections
“A killer portfolio of unique and natural juice from all over the Old World.”

José Pastor
“The Dressner of Spain.”

Distributors

David Bowler Wine
“He is smart enough to distribute Dressner and José Pastor. What else do you need to know?”

Rosenthal Wine Merchant
“Traditional, delicious, and ultrareliable wines from all over Europe.”

“Don't confuse power with greatness. Take a wine at 15 percent alcohol—fairly common nowadays, especially in California. That wine has 15 percent more booze than a wine at 13 percent. That's about an extra glass per bottle. It's the difference between just right and too much.” — Eric Asimov, chief wine critic, The New York Times

The Opening Ceremonies(which really shouldn't be that ceremonial)

13 | That cheap corkscrew stamped with the name and number of your local liquor store?

It's the only one you'll ever need.

14 | And in a pinch, a corkscrew isn't even necessary.

First take off the foil capsule, then take off your shoe and fit the
base of the bottle snugly in the heel, grasping the toe of the shoe
with one hand and the neck and shoulders of the bottle with the
other. Too much padding and this'll take forever, so remove your Dr.
Scholl's.

Find a hard vertical surface with no give. Keep the base of the
bottle firmly connected to the shoe and perpendicular to the wall;
you're driving the bottle into the wall with the shoe as a shock
absorber. Don't be too gentle. Wine bottles aren't made of little
girls.

Keep an eye on the cork, which should start inching out after a few
hard whacks. Once you can see enough cork to sink your teeth into,
try loosening it that way. Why? Because it looks badass.

15 | While you may need to “decant,” you don't need a decanter.

Even when you have a wine that needs to breathe (big, young reds, high-end Bordeaux, and trophy bottles of Burgundy and Brunello), save the $200 you'd spend on some mouth-blown crystal vessel and buy two or three or six bottles of damn good wine instead. Then “decant” them in a regular glass pitcher. Or a carafe. Or, hell, an unused flower vase. They all get oxygen into your wine, which is all that matters.

16 | Take acid (As a guide to pairing wine with food).

“Acidity is key. Think of it as a Zamboni for your palate: It wipes it clean and gets it ready for another round. You have a bite of food and then a sip of wine, and the acid scrubs your taste buds. Don't be afraid of acidity—seek it out. How to know if a wine has acid? Talk to your sommelier or your local wine-store clerk. That's exactly what we're here for.”

17

And for the love of God, don't sniff the cork. Ask yourself: What are you looking for?

“It's not chintzy to start off with what you'd like to spend. In fact, besides what you're eating and a few wines you've enjoyed lately, it's all I need to know. A good sommelier will always offer less-expensive options first. If not, you're in the wrong restaurant.” — Brick Loomis, sommelier, Culina Modern Italian, L.A.

18 | Get over the “Old World” thing…

Ten years ago, I sold out my country on a nightly basis. I wasn't some kind of double agent, just a sommelier at the all-Italian-all-the-time Babbo ristorante in Manhattan. Fresh off a year in Italy, my tie knots the size of my fist, I did my best to forget that I'm a half-Irish whiteboy from Connecticut who'd been to Europe all of once before the age of 30. Thousands of diners asked for an American “Chard” or “Cab” to enjoy with their bucatini all'amatriciana, and I negged them all, deflecting them instead to Friuli or Tuscany.

Most of my contemporaries had been similarly seduced by the Old World, and nothing was lamer in sommelier circles than California Chardonnay, the vinous “ugly American” in socks and sandals. Yes, the most exalted white wine on the planet—white Burgundy— is 100 percent Chardonnay, and American Chard-makers have long cited Burgundy as their inspiration, right before they make butterscotch syrup in their McChâteaux.

So imagine my distress when I took a job at Quince in San Francisco and was forced to change my tune, the Bay Area being famously proprietary about its local produce. I bought and sold plenty of Chard. Then I tasted Stony Hill's Napa Chardonnay for the first time. I was embarrassed: Here was a wine with the acidity and structure of a white Burgundy, and I'd never had it. There have been other humbling moments since then, which is the best thing that can happen to a wine guy. The minute you think you know everything, you're sunk—and if you claim your taste isn't influenced by fashion and peer pressure, you're lying. Whether it's Chard or Cab, I'm tasting more treble and less bass across the spectrum of American wine—and finding a lot to like along the way. — D.L.

THREE TO TRY

Stony Hill Napa Valley Chardonnay, $30

Peay Vineyards Sonoma Coast Chardonnay, $20

Au Bon Climat Santa Barbara County Chardonnay, $40

19 | ...And redraw your wine map.

Filip Verheyden, editor and publisher of the whip-smart, awesomely geeky, and encyclopedic Tong magazine (tongmagazine.com), on the most up-and-coming and underpriced regions in the world

Australia

WHERE: Margaret River and Barossa and Eden valleys, Australia

WHAT: Chardonnay

WHY: Australia came onto the stage in the 1980s with luscious, fat, and buttery wines aimed at entry-level drinkers. But these days the Aussies are turning out wines that could easily be mistaken for white Burgundy, until you check the price.

TWO TO TRY

Vasse Felix Heytesbury Chardonnay (Margaret River), $43

Yalumba Wild Ferment Chardonnay (Eden Valley), $17

South America

WHERE: Casablanca Valley and Colchagua Valley, Chile

WHAT: Syrah

WHY: Chilean wines were once considered boring, probably because they were. These days winemakers are looking to the cool and varied coast to produce fresher and more vibrant stuff. The Syrah from the coastal valleys is anything but dull.

TWO TO TRY

Loma Larga BK-BL Syrah (Casablanca Valley), $26

Montes Folly (Colchagua Valley), $73

Europe

WHERE: Burgenland and Weinviertel, Austria

WHAT: Blaufränkisch and Grüner Veltliner

WHY: Austria is producing some of the most interesting and least pronounceable European wines. Blaufränkisch reds were once made in the oak-heavy international style, but these days they're all about finesse—more Burgundy than Bordeaux. The Weinviertel, in the north, is where to find pure, refreshing Grüner Veltliners with plenty of minerality and a peppery finish.

TWO TO TRY

Schlossweingut Graf Hardegg Grüner Veltliner (Weinviertel), $15

Schieffer Blaufränkisch Szapary (Südburgenland), $40

U.S.A.

WHERE: Long Island, New York

WHAT: Sauvignon Blanc, red blends

WHY: The wines coming off the East Coast are a world apart from the hot and alcoholic Californian style. Long Island's maritime climate lends a freshness and minerality to everything from Pinot Grigio to Bordeaux-style blends.

TWO TO TRY

Peay Vineyards Sonoma Coast Chardonnay, $20

Channing Daughters Rosato di Merlot (Bridgehampton), $18*

*Yes, Channing Daughters is killing it right now.

20 | Sorry, ‘Sideways,’ but Merlot doesn't suck.

The Merlot business didn't go bad because Paul Giamatti said, “I am not drinking any fucking Merlot!” In fact, it never went bad; it went blah. Too many winemakers didn't care. Or they didn't think clearly about weather and soil, which they do only with fucking Pinot Noir. At its best, typically in Bordeaux, Merlot is among the noblest of grapes—lush, supple, smooth, powerful, and perfumed, the stuff of Château Pétrus. These days I look to Italy. Falesco's Umbria Merlot goes for about fifteen bucks, the fancier Montiano for twice that. — Alan Richman

21 | But seriously, we're not drinking any f#%*ing Zinfandel.

Is all “zin” superalcoholic schlock that tastes like Smucker's? Of course not. (The blends from Ridge Winery are a rule-proving exception.) But if we're flying blind, it's the last thing we'd pick, because the bad stuff is so, so bad.

22 | Don't let them serve you warm red wine.

If your red wine hits the table at the same temperature as a restaurant's dining room, don't be afraid to ask your server to take it down a few degrees. Red should be like a September afternoon in the Loire Valley: somewhere in the mid-50s.

23 | And learn to love certain reds even colder.

Jason Schwartz—general manager and co-director of the wine-and-spirits program at Marlow & Sons in Brooklyn—on which reds should be served as cold as whites

“The first sip can be bracing, but it's as refreshing and alive as any glass of white. And as the wine comes up by degree, the flavors open up and the juiciness comes into its own. It's all about the arc—how the wine develops and evolves. The reds that work best chilled are light, playful, low in tannins, and high in acidity. The French have a phrase for it, vin de soif, which means ‘thirst-quenching wine.’ Chill the stuff that should be drunk at lunch, not swirled around with your nose stuck in the glass.”

THREE TO TRY

Young un-oaked Pinot Noir
• Look for something you can see right through, which should indicate lighter body.

Any Gamay ever made
• A wine that sings when chilled. The perfect complement to fatty pork.

Cabernet Franc from the Loire Valley
• Dark and brooding, with herbaceous flavors that translate into cooling green tones.

24 | Wine by the keg? We'd tap that.

Charles Bieler, co-founder of the Gotham Project, on the coming wine-on-tap movement

“Between the cork, label, glass, and foil, you spend at least a dollar per bottle just on the dry goods alone. And what the hell for? We know that wine stores well in kegs—the larger the format, the better the wine is protected. And for fresh reds and whites, the primary aromas are best preserved in something bigger than a bottle. Once you break those wines into smaller lots, they start evolving really quickly, so the keg is a real bonus for a Riesling or a rosé. And these days, people are realizing that, thank God, wine doesn't have to be so stuffy. I can't wait for the day when you turn up at the winery with your jug, fill it up, and then go home.”

25 | And above all, don't be a ratings slave.

Sure, wine ratings are useful when you've got nothing else to go on, but all those 90+ stickers are just...some dude's opinion. If you know you don't love Barbaresco, all the points in the world won't make it taste better. And in the end, yours is the only palate that counts.

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